“She had to go on this quest. The fate of the world might depend on it. But part of him wanted to say: Forget the world. He didn’t want to be without her.”

“Monica was glad Walter was married, so she didn’t have to go into any of the other reasons she didn’t want to get involved with him, such as the fact that he had the intellectual depth of mayonnaise.”

“Emily looked at him for a long time. There were so many things she wanted to know—but she wanted not to know them even more. She didn’t want any more answers. He had been the one thing she could trust, the one person she could rely on. She wanted to beg him to be that way again. But it wasn’t him who had changed. It was her. It was her own credulity she really wanted back. And credulity, like virtue, could be lost only once.”

“I realized that it was not that I didn’t want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn’t know why I wanted to go on”

“She was a wicked thing sometimes. All full of want. As if the shape of the world depended on her mood. As if she were important.”

“but she realized that she wanted him to know her. She wanted him to understand her, if only because she had strange sense that he was the kind of man she could fall in love with, even if she didn't want to.”

“If she wanted my money, I'd give her every cent. If she wanted another man, I'd make her forget him”

“She wanted him to see all of her and also none of her. She wanted him to be dazzled by the bits and blinded by the whole. She wanted him to see her whole and not in pieces. She had hopes that were hard to satisfy.”

“She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there--like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.”

“He nodded and curled over his paper, writing quickly. As his words took form on the white page, she got to watch him… and realized she never wanted him to go. She wanted him here beside her forever.”